Mexico

2013

With
the sudden death of CPJ Mexico Representative Mike O'Connor, 67, on Sunday,
Mexican journalists have lost one of their most formidable advocates. Mike will
be remembered as someone who was on the forefront of the struggle for press
freedom. His superb skills as an investigative journalist helped scores of reporters
across the country during a period marred by violence and censorship.

Carlos Lauría, CPJ's Americas senior program coordinator, provided testimony before the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of US House of Representatives on Tuesday. Lauría emphasized that violence and government harassment are the main emerging trends that illustrate the major challenges facing the press in the Western hemisphere.

Organized crime capos and corrupt politicians have been
getting away with murdering journalists in Mexico for so long that there isn't
a reliable count on the number of the dead or a useful way to measure the
crushing effects on a democracy when a country's press is afraid to tell the
truth. CPJ research shows that, of 69 journalists killed since 1994 in Mexico,
28 were clearly killed because of their work, and nearly all of those directly
targeted for murder. But the killing started years before that, the numbers are
not dependable, and the motives are often unknown, because the professionalism
of the investigations is doubtful. Mexico's state governments have simply
failed to find those responsible, and journalists working outside of the
capital have for the most part decided their only protection is to not cover
stories the killers don't want covered.

A fellow newspaper photographer phoned him and said he had
to get right over to his parents' home because something very bad had happened.
When Miguel Angel López remembers seeing when he got there was "just blood. You
can't understand that much hatred." He was talking about the murders
of his mother, his father--a senior
editor at the state's most important newspaper--and his brother, a
photographer at the paper. The killings turned out to be the beginning of a war
on journalists.

The
Durango state governor was on his way to meet with reporters. Before he
arrived, the reporters huddled to decide the question of the moment. It seemed
obvious: Why had a former mayor been arrested the day before in what clearly
seemed to be a political move? "That was the only question," a reporter said later.
"Did the governor have the ex-mayor arrested? Because, behind that move, you
can feel a crackdown coming against the opposition." Yet, this reporter added,
"It was too dangerous to ask. No one was brave enough."

He certainly looked
guilty of something, and as if he'd finally been caught. With either his
head down or with a kind of scared, dead-eyed stare, in a white jumpsuit, in
front of the four Veracruz state police officers crowded behind him. They were all
in black uniforms, with a strip of face and eyes showing through black masks, with
four matte black assault rifles menacingly at the ready to guard a slim man in
handcuffs. (Actually, had there been any gunfire, the police were so over-armed
and so close together that it's likely one of them would have been the first
victim.) Still, it all looked good for the cameras and reporters summoned to
hear about the man's arrest and the end of a most doggedly troublesome case for
state officials: the murder of Regina Martínez Pérez on April 28 last year.

Who can say exactly when
the work of press freedom groups, human rights defenders, and budding networks
of Mexican journalists became a movement? It would have been many murders, many
funerals, many orphans ago. It would have been countless news events--about
crime, corruption, violence--that went
uncovered because reporters and news organizations concluded that the
only way to survive was to stay silent. But finally, several years ago, the
work of all these groups began topush
the massacre
of the Mexican press on to the national agenda. On Thursday, the
movement led
to a bill that gives the federal government jurisdiction over crimes
against journalists. Today, the measure awaits only the president's approval.

The OAS extraordinary
assembly, held at the organization's headquarters in Washington, D.C. on
Friday, adopted a resolution by which the 35 member states ratified the ability
of the commission to continue receiving voluntary contributions. Analysts and
human rights advocates say the decision was a blow to countries of the
Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, known as ALBA, which have been pushing to
preclude outside funding for the IACHR.

Tags:

Twenty-one people have been arrested for a wave
of crimes that included 11 murders (six of which were committed against police
officers), the abduction for hours of five employees of El Siglo de Torreón newspaper, the murder of a mayoral candidate,
and attempted murder of a current mayor in a large metropolitan area in central
Mexico,
according a senior federal official.

At any given time over the past two years, as wars raged in
Libya and then Syria, and as other conflicts ground on in South Asia and sub-Saharan
Africa, a number of journalists have been held captive by a diverse array of forces,
from militants and rebels to criminals and paramilitaries. And at any given
time, a small handful of these cases--sometimes one or two, sometimes
more--have been purposely kept out of the news media. That is true today.